Volume 23, Number 10 · June 10, 1976
Big Deals
By John Gardner
JR
by William Gaddis
Knopf, 726 pp., $5.95 (paper)
We may expect that such a long and long-awaited book as JR will fall into one of two categories; either some work intellectually and emotionally gargantuan, like Don Quixote, War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, or The Magic Mountain, or else some huge and magnificent, generous, ingenious, and memorable entertainment, like Our Mutual Friend or Old Wives' Tale. If one judged by the reviews that have appeared so far, one would imagine JR to be the former kind of work: obscure and full of boomings, perhaps even a true work of genius, which normally means pretentiously exclusive, turgidly self-indulgent, and awesomely unreadable, like Finnegans Wake. According to George Steiner in The New Yorker (and there are signs that Gaddis would like to think it's true) JR is indeed that fashionable monster 'the unreadable book.' Steiner scornfully quotes some passages, and to any one who hasn't read JR, they're persuasive. But if one has read the novel, one can only hop on one foot, spluttering in confusion and rage (like young JR), yelling 'Crazy! holy shit!'—because Steiner's right in a way. JR is, finally, bad art, but despite what Steiner thinks, it's wonderfully and easily readable.
Review, 4008 words
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